Joint Multi-Channel Link Layer and Multi-Path Routing Design for Wireless Mesh Networks

In recent years, the wireless mesh network (WMN) attracts the interest of many people as a new broadband Internet access technology. However, increasing throughput is still an open and challenging research issue. One potential solution is to enable transceivers to utilize multiple channels dynamically. However, most of existing works do not consider the routing issue, and trivially use some popular single-path routing protocols like AODV and DSR. In this paper, we exploit the benefit of multi-path routing in multi-channel WMNs from the aspect of end-to-end throughput. Between medium access control and network layers, we propose a novel protocol named Joint Multi-channel and Multi-path control (JMM) which combines multi-channel link layer with multi-path routing. Dividing time into slots, JMM coordinates channel usage among slots and schedules traffic flows on dual paths. Our scheme efficiently and intelligently decomposes contending traffics over different channels, different time, and different paths, and hence leads to significant throughput improvement. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work discussing the joint design of multi-channel control and multi-path routing for WMNs.